


i'll be an army

by smilebackwards



Category: Turn (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, M/M, Mutual Pining, Not Actually Unrequited Love, off-screen character deaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-10
Updated: 2017-07-10
Packaged: 2018-11-15 06:42:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11225442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smilebackwards/pseuds/smilebackwards
Summary: Ben looked at Caleb, pleading. “I need to—” But he’d already done it. Powered the plasma cannon. WhippedCato Dragoonaround 180 degrees and cut Arrowhead across the flank with the saber. Stained the miracle mile Kaiju Blue.





	i'll be an army

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Impala_Chick](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Impala_Chick/gifts).



“I’m switching to Mechanics,” Caleb told Ben at the end of their second year at the Academy.

“What? Why?” Ben asked, stunned. He and Caleb had gone into the Rangers together at eighteen. They’d already passed every test for Drift compatibility aside from a true neural handshake inside a Jaeger.

Caleb shrugged nonchalantly but his eyes shifted away. “They need Jaegers as much as they need pilots. I’ll build you the best one yet, Tallboy. What do you want? A sword, of course. Flamethrower? Plasma cannon?”

 _I want_ you, Ben thought, numbly.

A line of cold raced down Ben’s spine. A full quarter of the Ranger’s class had dropped the program after one of the active pilots had given a guest lecture about the Drift in Aviation Physiology. That had been weeks ago but Ben still remembered exactly what he’d said:

 _You share everything in the Drift. Thoughts, memories—you don’t get to pick and choose; it’s all laid bare._

As he’d looked at the pilot’s haggard face, it had only hardened Ben’s resolve. There were only seven— _seven_ —pilot teams to cover the entire Pacific coastline. 

He and Caleb shared almost everything anyway. There were things they didn’t talk about, but there was nothing in Ben’s mind that couldn’t be seen in his eyes every time he looked at Caleb.

Maybe he’d just assumed; maybe it wasn’t the same for Caleb.

“Plasma cannon,” Ben said, because what else could he say. He couldn’t force Caleb to be his copilot. Ben’s heart felt bruised and shocked, but at least if they weren’t going to Drift, Caleb never had to know.

-

Ben had been at the Los Angeles Shatterdome for almost a year when André and Peggy died taking down a Category III, making Anna and Abigail the last pilots left to cover the West Pacific Line. 

Ben graduated top of his class from the Academy but it didn’t matter how good a candidate you were if you didn’t get a copilot match. The neural load could crack your mind like an egg. No Drift partner, no Jaeger. 

They started pulling in everyone to test against the unmatched pilots: cooks from the kitchen, junior scientists from the labs, people that looked like they’d been taken off the street but had iron in their eyes. Everyone had gotten used to the words, _Neural bridge exercise invalid. Drift sequence terminated. Would you like to try again?_

Ben thought the mechanics would have been next but then a group of pilot candidates from the Hong Kong Shatterdome had arrived and Ben had been strapped into _Cato Dragoon_ with Nathan Hale. 

Anna had told him that it was a kind of terrifying euphoria linking up in the Drift. Like hurtling downhill on the world’s tallest rollercoaster. 

It hadn’t been like that for Ben and Nathan. It had been excruciating. Ben remembered the bone-aching jolt of misalignment. He’d chased the rabbit; the stain of Kaiju Blue bright on Sam’s pale skin, Caleb’s hand tight on Ben’s shoulder. 

Finally, _finally_ , they’d locked. 

The cheering had reverberated through the hull of _Cato Dragoon_. Ben hadn’t even realized when the engine powered down. Marshal Washington and Lucas Brewster were smiling in the control room.

Nathan punched him in the shoulder and grinned once they extracted themselves from the circuitry suits. “Bet Caleb will be proud of you,” he said, because after the Drift he’d known Ben almost as well as Ben knew himself, and Caleb’s face had been down every one of Ben’s rabbit holes.

Caleb had been proud. 

“Good for you, Bennyboy,” he’d said, his smile so wide it looked almost painful, and drank an entire bottle of the terrifying moonshine they distilled down in Mechanics.

“I’m sorry,” Caleb said as Ben steered him unsteadily back to his room after the celebrations wound down.

“It’s fine, Caleb,” Ben told him. He pulled off Caleb’s shoes and untangled the faded standard-issue blanket from the foot of Caleb’s bunk. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t done before.

“No. Ben,” Caleb said, his voice oddly desperate. “I’m _sorry_.”

Ben frowned. “It’s okay. Now that I have a copilot I can do my job for real, not just training.” 

Caleb laughed but it wasn’t a happy sound. “It should have been me,” he said.

 _Why wasn’t it?_ Ben wanted to ask, so badly. He’d bitten back the words for years. 

Caleb tipped sideways until his head met his pillow and Ben tucked the blanket over him. He put his hand against Caleb’s forehead, bushing back his hair. _At least I can protect you now,_ Ben thought as he turned out the light and closed the bulkhead door behind him.

-

Ben and Nathan had five confirmed kills by the time the next copilot match happened. 

Abe and Robert were an unexpected compatibility that came out of the new ‘throw everything at the wall and see what sticks’ matching method. Siblings still went first but after that everyone was fair game. No more of the endless personality quizzes and algorithms that were apparently more effective at predicting marriages than Drift partners.

With three pilot teams on the West Pacific Line, everyone had taken a deep breath of relief. The program sent Ben and Nathan, along with Caleb for Mechanics and Hewlett from K-Science, on a public relations tour. 

Ben smiled through his teeth and posed for the November page of the Ranger’s calendar with his shirt off and his helmet tucked under his arm. The photographer complimented him on his smouldering eyes, but honestly Ben was just angry. He’d never understood why funding what was essentially humanity’s only line of defense against Kaiju incursion seemed to be such a hard sell.

Caleb was better at it. He smiled and joked with the crew for Cullen Tonight as the makeup artists examined them and rustled through drawers of brushes and powders.

“I don’t really need to do anything for you,” the woman looking at Ben said, shaking her head. She swept a bit of powder across his forehead and down the bridge of his nose.

“I know, right?” Caleb agreed. “Look at the cheekbones! The eyelashes!”

Ben ducked his head. All the Jaeger pilots had fans but the mailroom had once told Ben that, after Anna, who got twenty marriage proposals a day, he probably had the most. Ben always had a dim awareness of his status as an odd kind of celebrity but he’d never really looked at all the letters or social media. He was at the Shatterdome to do a job.

“I’ve got coffee,” Nathan said, coming into the room with three cups held together in a triangle formation in his hands. “The good stuff. They told me it gets shipped in from Brazil.” The studio was in a safe zone on the east coast where Atlantic shipping didn’t suffer the Kaiju threat of the Pacific. The Shatterdomes didn’t often get luxury goods like that.

“You’re a blessing, Hale,” Caleb said, taking his cup. “Is Hewlett done? They told me I’d be on after him.”

“He’s giving a lecture about event patterns so it could be hours yet,” Nathan said, “but the PA told me to send you over.”

Caleb stood, sweeping off the protective apron that covered his Pan Pacific Defense Corps dress uniform. The stars on his lapels shone bright silver and there was a medal on his chest for each of the three Jaegers he’d built. “I’ll warm up the crowd for you, Tallboy,” Caleb said, throwing Ben a wink. 

“Wait, you two aren’t the pilots?” one of the cameramen asked, confused. 

“Nathan and I are the pilots,” Ben clarified. “Caleb is Mechanics.”

There was a beat of silence while everyone absorbed that. “Well, you all look like a great team,” the man said, a little stilted.

“We are,” Nathan said cheerfully. He’d never held it against anyone when people assumed that Ben and Caleb were the pilot team. “Caleb built _Cato Dragoon._ ”

 _Cato Dragoon_ was made for Ben, and everybody knew it. Caleb had measured Ben’s shoulder width, his sleeves, neck, chest—the works—so the body of the Jaeger would be perfectly to scale. The saw-blade saber controlled by the right arm, the plasma cannon, and the tactical missile array had all been built according to his specifications. A rail gun might have been better for Nathan’s fighting style, but he’d taken well to the plasma cannon. Hades and Stonefist could attest to that.

“I love having pilots on the show,” Cullen said, when it was Ben and Nathan’s turn on stage. “You’re always so in tune.”

Ben and Nathan turned to look at each other in perfect sync and the studio audience laughed and applauded.

Cullen grinned. “We have the perfect game for you two,” he said, pulling two whiteboards from beneath his desk. Ben took the blue marker and handed Nathan the black. _The Jaeger Pilot Game,_ the screen behind them read, lights outlining the words like a cinema sign.

“Ben, let’s start with you,” Cullen said, tapping a stack of notecards against the desk top. “If Nathan could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?”

 _Greenland,_ Ben wrote and then had to erase it with his fist. That was Caleb’s answer, not Nathan’s. Nathan loved Tokyo; the soba noodles and the cherry blossoms, the bustling markets and the quiet shrines nestled under the giant, sky-reaching ribs of defeated Nodachi.

Nathan flipped his whiteboard. His penmanship was small and precise, all capitals. TOKYO.

Ben and Nathan only missed one question, but afterwards, Ben couldn’t stop thinking about the untidy scrawl of handwriting in the margins of Jaeger schematics, how he’d known every answer for Caleb even without the Drift.

-

There were two million people in Anchorage and Ben promised Caleb he’d bring _Cato Dragoon_ back with barely a scratch. 

“Three scratches _maximum,_ Tallboy!” Caleb had shouted at him over the blare of the alarms as Ben and Nathan ran for the hangar.

Ben had waved him off.

“And none on Ben here. I know,” Nathan had laughed, slinging an arm around Ben’s shoulders. 

_Cato Dragoon_ was in pieces. Ben felt like he was in pieces too. Like half of him had been ripped away and drowned. 

The ground wasn’t solid beneath his feet and his legs couldn’t hold him anyway. Everything was white and cold except for the burning hot knives embedded in his brain. 

-

Ben woke up in the infirmary. His mind felt like a snapped cable, the ends sparking and sharp. 

“Ben,” Caleb said, urgently. He was sitting beside Ben’s bed, his eyes bloodshot, hair a mess. “Ben, can you hear me?”

“Caleb,” Ben said. Or tried to say, at least. His tongue felt heavy. Everything hurt.

“Thank Christ,” Caleb said.

Ben looked at the empty bed beside him. “Where’s— Where’s—,” _Nathan._

Caleb’s face went bleak. “Ben,” he said, gentle, “Nathan didn’t make it.”

 _Of course he didn’t,_ Ben thought, stupidly. He’d been there. Nathan had said, “Ben! We need to—” _Shock. Fear. Pain. Pain._ Gone.

Ben looked at Caleb, pleading. “I need to—” But he’d already done it. Powered the plasma cannon. Whipped _Cato Dragoon_ around 180 degrees and cut Arrowhead across the flank with the saber. Stained the miracle mile Kaiju Blue.

“Ben,” Caleb said. He put his hands on either side of Ben’s face, steadying. “Go back to sleep.”

-

Ben slept for three more days, half-conscious and half-dreaming, and then he got up. He leaned heavily on his IV pole as he slowly made his way toward the bathroom and flipped on the light.

Ben could see why Caleb barely left his side. He looked terrible: skin paper thin, the whites of his eyes clouded red with burst blood vessels. When he moved, his bones hurt, and it showed.

“Christ,” Caleb said, rushing into the bathroom, “I was gone for thirty minutes and I come back to find you walking around like you shouldn’t be flat on your back for at least another week. Get back in bed.” There was engine grease on his hands.

“Are you fixing _Cato Dragoon_?” Ben asked. He tried not to look like he was hobbling his way back to the bed, but from how Caleb hovered and put a hand under his arm to help, he didn’t think he succeeded.

Caleb nodded. “Sorry,” he said, wiping at the grease that had transferred from his hand to Ben’s elbow. 

The smear of black didn’t look out of place among the rest of the bruises lining Ben’s arms. “Sorry I brought her back with more than three scratches,” Ben said, trying to smile.

Caleb didn’t smile back. “I don’t care about the Jaeger, Ben. You were in a coma for almost three weeks, did you know that?”

Ben hadn’t known that. He’d woken up with a catheter and an IV so he’d figured at least a few days, but three _weeks._ Ben swallowed thickly. “Did I— Did I miss the memorial service?”

“Yeah,” Caleb said, apologetic. “They waited a week but then they added Nathan’s name to the list.”

Ben almost didn’t need to see it. He’d been to the pilot’s memorial wall a hundred times, traced Tallmadge with his fingers twice over and felt the sword hanging over his head, but that night he pulled himself out of bed, unhooked his IV, and walked unsteadily down the the corridor, hand trailing along the wall like a brace. _Nathan Hale_ was inscribed just below _John André,_ an empty space off to the right. 

Pilots almost always died together. No one else aside from Marshal Washington himself had ever solo piloted a Jaeger and lived. The pads of Ben’s fingers slid over the slick granite where his name might have been. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, and turned his face away.

-

“I need a new copilot,” Ben said. 

Abe and Robert had been transferred to the Sydney Shatterdome along with _Gauge Quaker_ after a Category IV had killed one pilot team and destroyed most of the other Jaeger that had finally taken it down. The only other copilot match in the meantime had been a pair of twins from Moscow who’d been assigned to Vladivostok. Anna and Abigail were the last active pilots on the West Pacific Line again.

“Ben,” Caleb said carefully, “you can’t go out there again.”

“I have to,” Ben said. Anna and Abigail looked exhausted. _Cicero Strong_ needed a core upgrade that would take weeks. 

His father and Sam had never shirked their duty. 

The Academy had pulled Ben out of his Computational Mechanics class when Sam and his father died twenty miles off the coast of Lima. Ben hadn’t expected it, but it hadn’t been a true surprise. The average life expectancy of a Jaeger pilot was two years, and if the Kaiju didn’t get you, the radiation poisoning would. 

Ben had made his peace with that for himself a long time ago. At three years active duty, he was already an outlier. 

Without Nathan, Ben was back on standby status. He went to physical therapy dutifully, handed Caleb tools in the mechanic’s bays, and practiced in the simulator. Drop, kill. Drop, kill. Drop, kill. 

Ben didn’t ever expect to catch up to Abigail’s 91 drops, 91 kills or Anna’s 90—their first place standing constantly traded back and forth and not even counting their 12 actual Kaiju kills—but he was coming up on Peggy’s old score. Ben felt his heart jump seeing Caleb’s name in the rankings. He still practiced the simulator enough to be in the top 10.

“Marshal,” Ben said, as soon as the doctors cleared him for light duty, “I’d like to go through compatibility matching for a new copilot.” All the existing candidates had failed to Drift with each other. With Ben back in the pool, that was another thirty odd potential matches.

Washington looked at Ben steadily. For a moment, Ben thought he might ask if Ben was sure. Then Washington’s eyes shifted to the war clock. Nineteen hours until the next Kaiju event was predicted. _Cicero Strong_ was still in the main mechanics bay undergoing essential core maintenance and even with every mechanic in the Shatterdome working overtime, they were looking at more than 24 hours. That left at least five hours without coastal coverage. A Kaiju could decimate a city in that time. If it came down to it, Anna and Abigail were going to have to try to pilot the newly rebuilt _Cato Dragoon,_ the controls and weaponry entirely different than their usual configuration, or Abe and Robert were going to need to be preemptively recalled from Sydney with _Gauge Quaker_.

“All right, Benjamin,” Washington said quietly. Any long shot was better than none. “I’ll put out the call. Volunteers will be in the ready room in an hour.”

“Thank you, sir,” Ben said. It occurred to him suddenly that there might not be many volunteers. Ben was damaged goods. A lost copilot, their Drift connection snapped violently to top it off, wasn’t the most stable prospect. Caleb tried to keep Ben insulated, walking beside him like a sentinel, but after Nathan, people looked at Ben like he was a ghost. Conversations stopped when he walked into a room. 

Ben took a deep breath before he turned the corner to the ready room an hour later. He needn’t have worried. Imminent death has always been a good motivator. All the pilot candidates were there, plus dozens of people from the labs and support staff. 

Ben’s eyes immediately looked for Caleb. He wasn’t there. 

Ben shook it off and picked up a sparring stick. Running the usual drills on the mats ruled out a few obvious mismatches. No one was Caleb or Nathan or Sam, but Ben picked the top five potentials and called up to the control tower to ask Lucas Brewster to set up for the neural handshake testing. 

_Neural test commencing in 30 minutes,_ echoed through the Shatterdome. People streamed through the hallways toward the launch bay to watch.

“Ben, what the fuck,” Caleb said, skidding into _Cato Dragoon_ as Ben was calibrating the harnesses for test mode.

“I told you I needed to find a new copilot,” Ben said. He looked at Caleb, concerned. “Aren’t you working on the core upgrade for _Cicero_? You know this is a long shot. There’s no guarantee I’ll match with any of them.”

“I’m going to be here for this,” Caleb said stubbornly.

“All right,” Ben said, putting on his helmet.

The first test didn’t go well. Ben and Roe couldn’t even calibrate. “Sorry, man,” Roe said, disconnecting from the circuitry suit. “I’ll send Havens in.”

Ben shook his head. “Not your fault.” Drift compatibility was 1 in 1500 based on the latest statistics. It was amazing anyone outside of family members ever matched.

Havens went even worse. 

It started off promising. Both hemispheres calibrated. Neural interface Drift initiated. Ben tried to hold onto the silence that the best pilots could achieve in the Drift but he caught a flash of memory from Havens—the announcement that had gone through the Shatterdome when _Cato Dragoon_ was destroyed. Ben’s mind snapped to ten miles off the Anchorage coast, Nathan smiling and then the Kaiju ripping through the hull and his smile dropping away. Havens’ mind slipped to the memorial ceremony, short speeches and bleak eyes as Nathan’s name was carved onto the wall.

It hurt like hell to be knocked out of alignment but Ben was glad it happened before the feedback loop had continued. Sam and his father would have been next.

Havens disconnected from the circuitry suit unsteadily. He patted Ben on the shoulder before he limped out of the Jaeger.

“Ben,” Lucas said though the comm, “do you want to take a break?”

“I’m okay,” Ben said. The countdown clock wasn’t going to stop. Neither was Ben. “Can you send in Mary?”

But it wasn’t Mary who entered the Jaeger.

“Fuck it, no, stop,” Caleb said. “I can’t watch you do this one more time. You’ll know why in a second.” And then he climbed into the right hemisphere circuitry suit.

_Pilot-to-pilot connection protocol sequence. Neural handshake initiated._

Ben felt it this time. The swoop of his stomach like Anna’s rollercoaster. Like falling in love.

It was odd seeing himself in Caleb’s memories, the reverse image of Ben’s own. Ben remembered the the sixteen green candles on Caleb’s birthday cake, his eyes clenched closed with wishing, but in Caleb’s memory, Ben was the focus, and in Caleb’s memory, Ben _shone._

The memory changed and Ben was staring down at Sam’s body, Kaiju Blue staining his brother’s face like ink exploded from a pen. The PPDC hadn’t been able to recover Ben’s father’s body, but they’d found Sam, his legs still encased in what remained of the right hemisphere circuitry suit of _Steel Prayer._

Sam and Ben had been four years apart but they’d shared every feature. Ben hadn’t really noticed; he’d looked at Sam and seen his brother. Looking through the lens of Caleb’s memory, Ben felt a sudden sense of vertigo. Caleb had looked down at Sam and seen Ben’s future and all the ways he was helping him toward it. He’d switched to Mechanics as the only way he’d seen to keep Ben safe. It had given Ben one extra year on standby and then had the unintended consequence of meaning that when he did match, it was Nathan out there at his side, not Caleb. 

The memory shifted to Caleb, white-knuckled in the control room, during Ben and Nathan’s fight with Stonefist. He’d never been afraid that the Kaiju would make land. He’d thought, _Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben._

Ben was dimly aware of his own memories flowing to Caleb. The two of them shoulder to shoulder, bathed in the blue light of the television screen as they’d watched the first Kaiju attack on San Francisco. The way Ben had felt looking up at _Cato Dragoon_ at the unveiling ceremony, his hand pressed against the solidity of the metal, knowing that Caleb had built it for him. What Ben had thought every time he and Nathan fought a Kaiju: _If you don't win this, Caleb could die._ He'd always won.

_Neural bridge locked._

“You love me,” they both said, shocked, and in perfect sync.

“Of course I do,” Ben said, perplexed. “I’ve always—”

Caleb made a move like he wanted to step toward Ben but he was locked in place by the circuitry suit. Ben didn’t need him to say anything, not while they were connected in the Drift. _When we get out of this Jaeger,_ Caleb thought, and an image flashed through Ben’s mind, Caleb pressing him back against the bulkhead door as he kissed him.

“Tallmadge’s vitals are spiking,” Ben heard Lucas say through the comms, his voice concerned. “Ben, are you okay?”

Caleb laughed. “He’s fine, Uncle Lucas.”

“All right,” Lucas said, dubiously. “Let’s get you two out of—” 

The screens on _Cato Dragoon_ flashed red a moment before the klaxons rang out. _Kaiju alert. Category III. 9000 tons._

It was fourteen hours early but Ben had never felt more ready. He looked to Caleb.

Caleb smiled and set the plasma cannon to power up. “You and me, Tallboy. Let’s kick some Kaiju ass.”

  



End file.
